The Unused Front Door vs. the Intimacy Gradient

It's dumb to include a front door in the traditional place in a house if everyone is going to use the informal way in. The kitchen door, the sliding glass door on the family room...if they are next to where visitors walk up or park their cars, no one is going to hike around to the quiet part of the house to knock on the "real" front door.

The problem is that this "real world" thinking leads to the feeling that the visitor's entry into the house wasn't designed. It works, and most people wouldn't question it, but it doesn't contribute to anyone's confidence in the design of the home.

One solution is to move the formal entry to the more natural place. This is similar to "desire paths" in a park: pave sidewalks where feet have worn down the grass.

Problem: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.

That's the benefit of the traditional front door, opening into a dedicated entry space. It is the place where the UPS delivery person knocks and leaves a note; the place where first-time guests are officially greeted and their bottle of wine accepted. Family and good friends might let themselves in, but they don't step into the middle of the home, they proceed toward the middle from the periphery.

Solution: Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

In Trees House, the owner enters from the garage into the open plan kitchen/dining/family area, and we are considering whether to attach an entry to the open plan (e.g., plan A.7) or to create a hall that starts at the entry and takes a visitor past the living room toward the open space (e.g., plan A.9).

The A.7 approach is more space-efficient. The A.9 plan reveals the home more slowly. 

Traditional homes (center hall Colonials, for example) provide a path for visitors to be conducted through a house without disturbing the cocktail party or the bridge game. Father entertains his boss in the living room, Mother greets Aunt at the door and they head to the kitchen. But this traditional thinking leads to the living room as an unused artifact behind an invisible velvet rope.

When shown into one of those polar parlors...the heart cries, "Take me where the people stay; I didn't come to see the chairs."--William C. Gannett

One appeal of "open plan" living is that the dining table can be used for many things, not just the occasional formal dinner. A.7 puts the dining table in the middle of things; A.9 creates a polar parlor. 

A.7 does not connect the entry with the middle of the house so much as it makes the middle of the house less intimate, which may be correct. The open plan area--party central, kitchen, dining table, window wall--becomes the public space only one step more intimate than the entry space. The bedrooms and suites are the more intimate areas, not the open plan rooms.

Plan B.7 (2/3/15) is A.7 without the stairs to the master suite over the garage

By keeping the low pitched hip roof on both sides it ties the building together. the 2-story core adds excitement to the design and celebrates the site. The coat/shoe storage at the entry provides privacy while letting the space remain open. The east clerestories let light play across the room on the morning and brightens up the interior.